(Above is a narration of this review! Let me know if you think this is a helpful or useful addition.)
App Name: Voice Dream Reader
Price/Platform: $14.99 (with IAP)
Review Version: 4.0
Developer Website: http://voicedream.com/
Download: App Store Link
Features
Voice Dream Reader is a full featured text-to-speech app! It offers a wide range of features and options allowing you to customize your reading and listening experience. The app utilizes easy to use tap gestures and easy to navigate screens. As a result, Voice Dream Reader (VDR) is one of the most popular text-to-speech apps out there and also one of the most capable.
The reading screen of Voice Dream Reader 4.0
Display Settings
One of the two areas that VDR really excels at is with the display options. The app offers a number of different settings related to the font and spacing, screen color settings, and the speech cursor/highlighting function. Which leads us to one of the most important features of the display settings, the highlight and speech cursor. It allows VDR to simultaneously highlight and speak out the word on the screen. Depending on your needs, you can choose to highlight just the spoken line, both the line and the word, or not highlight anything. Finally, you can choose how many lines of text you see displayed on the screen- with either all lines visible, or just 5, 3, or 1 lines.
Note: If you are viewing PDFs, you have the option to view either the original layout of the PDF (text highlighting will still work) or the text-only layout.
Speech Cursor: show spoken line
Speech Cursor: show spoken line and word
Audio Settings
The other area the app excels with is with text-to-speech. Off the bat, you can choose from a variety of different iOS voices, with Samantha being the default US English voice. You can also purchase high-quality premium voices from Acapela, Ivona, and NeoSpeech that span several different languages. Regardless of the voice you choose to use, you can customize the speech rate, pitch, and volume. In addition to the voice settings, VDR has a custom pronunciation dictionary that you can set up to either pronounce or skip certain words or phrases.
Reading
Once you have all the settings to your liking your ready to go! The apps reading interface is pretty straight forward, but there are some really interesting features. They include Finger Reading (located under Reading Mode), which lets you point to a word and VDR will speak it out. There is Pac-Man Mode (under Visual settings), which causes the text that has already been spoken to disappear. And a timer mode to let you set a specific interval to listen to your content before stopping. Additionally, VDR allows you to make notes, highlight text (which can be exported) and add bookmarks.
Organizing and File Support
Finally, VDR displays all of your content in either a grid or list view. You can further filter the view by content source, playtime, title, date, or by folder. On the content side of things, the app supports PDFs, Plain and Rich text files, web articles, MS Word and Powerpoint, ePub, Audiobooks (MP3 and MP4) and DAISY text and audio files. The app also offers direct integration with iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Google Drive, Bookshare, Pocket and iOS web browsers via an extension. You can also choose to sync your library among your iOS and macOS devices using iCloud sync.
Summary
Voice Dream Reader is a powerful text-to-speech app that has accessible reading in mind!
Pros:
- Is very well designed and a well thought out app
- When using PDFs, allows you to choose between the original layout or text-only layout
- You can control the app via control central or headphone controls (i.e. pause/play/forward/rewind content)
- Highly customizable visual and audio settings
Cons:
- Does not support DRM-protected books from Amazon Kindle or iBook
- iCloud Sync can behave inconsistently at time when syncing certain content
How I use it
I use Voice Dream Reader in a visual/auditory hybrid configuration. I really like that I can read and listen at the same time or just listen if I want. One of the highlights of the app for me is its strong support for PDFs, .docx and Bookshare integration. I have found the app incredibly helpful in school, as I can import just about any PDF I have and it will read it to me. Or I can listen to textbooks from Bookshare in it, and in many cases, I find that VDR is 100X better then the official Bookshare app. Another feature I use heavily is its Pocket integration. I use Voice Dream Reader to listen to the longer length articles in my list, and in many cases listening to it is much easier then visually reading it. Overall, I absolutely love VDR, and I have become extremely reliant on it. It is one of the best made and supported apps I have come across in the App Store.
In-App Purchases (IAP)
This app offers an in-app purchase for additional voices from NeoSpeech, Acapela, and Ivona. The voices range from $2.99 to $4.99 and are pretty hefty downloads (most are 400MB and above). Unfortunately, there is no longer a way to fully trial the voices out other then listening to a brief sample before buying.
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